Re: Standard Library Interest?

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

O.K. I'm not dismissing an Open Source route, and I'm not dismissing an 
all-volunteer, unpaid, organically grown route either. What I *am* 
dismissing is the idea that we can somehow survey all the Ada users out 
there and come up with a coherent set of requirements on which to base 
it. I'm dismissing the notion that once implemented, all those Ada users 
are then going to drop what they *are* using in favor of the library put 
out there. I'm further dismissing the idea that the vendors will then 
see the light and get on board and start distributing it.

We've been down a route that was some version of "Lets get everyone's 
consensus on what they want and then try to come up with something that 
will be adopted by all..." Its been tried more than once. There is no 
standard library being shipped by vendors as a result of that. That's 
why I'm saying lets try a *different* route - one that would be to get 
the *vendors* to act as "Customer Representatives" and stipulate what it 
is they want to see done. (Think of it as a Republic rather than a 
Democracy) The vendors are in a good position to know what sort of 
requirements their customers might have and - rather than try to get a 
consensus from a few thousand users - you get it from a handful of 
representatives.

Given that you might get requirements from the vendors as customer 
representatives, one would presume that they would bundle it and ship it 
to their customers once built. Doing that would go an *IMENSE* way 
towards making the library a de-facto standard because people tend to 
use what they get with their compiler rather than try to go use 
something they just glommed off the Internet. They might complain that 
it wasn't done the way they wanted it done (I do that here from time to 
time, don't I?) or that it could have been better or that it excluded 
their pet features - but they'd USE IT because it was there and of good 
quality.

That's where I see the critical difference and where it is that we 
apparently disagree - you want to start with a few hundred or more 
requirements writers and hope that consensus across a few thousand (or 
more) users is going to result, thus bringing the vendors on board. I 
want to start with 2, 3, 4 vendors and let them bring the customers/end 
users on board. Your approach has been tried a number of times and not 
resulted in much. Mine has yet to be tried and may fail for a whole 
different batch of reasons - but they will be *different*. :-)

MDC



Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:
> 
> So I guess if I was to summarize my point in response it would be
> simply this: "don't dismiss the open sourced route, simply because
> it has been tried, and been unfunded.  While the past is often an
> indicator of what is likely, it does not necessarily predispose
> it to failure." I think the last sentence is where we mostly
> disagree. ;-)
> 


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Marin David Condic
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